We recently mentioned that a big supporter of DRM stopped by in the comments to insist that DRM was here to stay despite plenty of evidence of its gradual decline in the market. Well, now the EFF has pointed out more evidence of the death of DRM. It wasn't that long ago that the RIAA was pushing for laws that would require DRM on any streaming music offering (yes, streams, rather than downloads). Since many streaming services simply stream straight MP3s, it's possible to record them, or to simply copy them from their "hidden" places on your hard drive. Yet, the EFF has noticed that even the big services that have officially licensed music from the big labels are using plain MP3 streaming, which would suggest that even the RIAA isn't insisting that its partners use DRM on streams.

Of course, this raises a second important question. If these services are officially allowed to download MP3s to your desktop, is there anything illegal in then keeping the files? Most of these services work by effectively downloading the plain MP3 into a slightly hidden folder (it's not really hidden, they just don't make it clear where it is). Considering that it's a legal, RIAA-approved service downloading a plain old MP3 to your hard drive, it's difficult to see how they could claim copyright infringement if you were to keep that file, right? Of course, considering how much the RIAA is trying to charge these sites, they may not live all that long anyway.

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An anonymous reader writes "The web is evil and must be stopped — because it makes public information too public. So says Canada's Privacy Commissioner. She wants to 'anonymize' court records by substituting initials for names. The Toronto Star quotes Jennifer Stodddart as saying 'The open court rule, which is extremely historically important, has now become distorted by the effect of massive search engines... Court decisions and other related documents, which contain all sorts of personal information, are now searchable worldwide, which was never intended when openness rules were devised.' All Stoddart's proposal would do is erect a minor barrier for the techno unsaavy. Researchers, reporters, geeks, and most teenagers would still be able to figure out who's who. Stoddart seems to believe only in an abstract notion of freedom and access — but only as long as not too many people use it and no one suffers. She cites the case of someone who is upset at reading the divorce case of her parents. Is Stoddart a danger or a menace? Or just clueless?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Against Monopoly points us to an LA Times story about an economics professor from Caltech, R. Preston McAfee, who has written what he calls an "open source" economics textbook. You can download the textbook for free, and can even modify it (he offers up both a pdf version and a "source code" Word doc). It's not quite "open source" in that you're not allowed to do anything commercial with it, but it's certainly a lot cheaper than a standard econ textbook. We get plenty of questions here about where one should start learning about economics knowledge -- and while a textbook without a teacher isn't always the best place, if you did want to dig into a text, this is obviously a good place to start.

I haven't gone through the whole thing, but a quick spot check on various topics suggests that (at least in that random sample) the text is clear, well-written and does a good job explaining those concepts. And while it doesn't get into anything beyond your basic intro econ, the guy does seem to recognize the basic economics of information. As he notes in the LA Times article:

"What makes us rich as a society is what we know and what we can do. Anything that stands in the way of the dissemination of knowledge is a real problem."

And, in the opening itself certainly suggests he understands the whole scarce/infinite goods dichotomy:

Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources among people – examining what goods and services wind up in the hands of which people. Why scarce resources? Absent scarcity, there is no significant allocation issue.

Indeed. And, it's nice to see scarcity becoming absent from a good econ text as well, so "allocate" away.

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An anonymous reader writes "In an online survey, 42 percent of Internet users admitted to logging into other people's email and social networking accounts without their knowledge. The poll doesn't ask if passwords were found, granted, or stolen — which would make for further interesting results. The write-up summarizing the results defines the respondents as part of an "educated tech-readership" and questions the ethics of logging onto someone else's account, and whether those differ depending on the person and relationship."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "In an online survey, 42 percent of Internet users admitted to logging into other people's email and social networking accounts without their knowledge. The poll doesn't ask if passwords were found, granted, or stolen — which would make for further interesting results. The write-up summarizing the results defines the respondents as part of an "educated tech-readership" and questions the ethics of logging onto someone else's account, and whether those differ depending on the person and relationship."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just last month we pointed to a study that showed that more experienced internet users checked their email a lot less, as they had realized what a distraction it could be. Of course, there are some people who just can't resist -- so it's interesting to see companies and services trying to deal with it. First there was the launch of a service called HitMeLater, which lets you forward your email to an address that determines when it will resend that email again. That is, if you get an email that you don't want to deal with right away, but know you'll forget about it once it scrolls out of the main pane of your inbox, you can just forward it to 4@hitmelater.com and it will email that message back to you four hours later. You can replace the number with any number of hours you want, or with the name of a day, and it will resend the email on that day.

But apparently it wasn't just HitMeLater thinking about this type of service. Microsoft is apparently experimenting with its own email snooze button for Outlook. It's different than HitMeLater, in that this is really a solution for those who simply can't resist checking email. Instead, you can have the system put up a virtual "Do Not Disturb" sign -- and Outlook won't sync up your email for whatever period of time is specified. Of course, there will be those who will say that people just need to learn some discipline on their own, but knowing that's not going to happen, what's wrong with some tools to help people out?

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Lucas123 writes "With gas prices 30% higher this summer over last, telecommuting is back on everyone's radar. According to a Computerworld story, however, IT and telecommuting don't have a great record of success. For example, citing negative impacts on productivity, HP ended its telecommuting policy for hundreds of workers two years ago, and this year, Intel began requiring more than half the teleworkers in its IT group to report to the office at least four days a week. So before leaping, some questions you should ask as a manager if you're considering telework include: How will you define and measure performance? Will creativity suffer? What about employees stuck in the office?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over the past few months, at least twice a week, I've received a phone call on my mobile phone with a stern (almost angry) recorded voice saying "this is your second warning that the factory warranty on your vehicle is about to expire." Of course, the factory warranty on my car isn't about to expire, and considering that I've received about 30 of these calls, it's difficult to believe it's the "second" warning. Apparently, I'm not the only one to receive these calls. An informal poll of friends found that more than 50% of them were all receiving the same bogus calls. While those already broke various telemarketing rules, it appears that the FTC is looking to further crack down, announcing that all pre-recorded telemarketing sales calls are banned without a signed, written agreement allowing the calls. Informational calls (non-sales calls) such as informing you that a flight has been delayed are allowed -- but sales calls are not.

Of course, the big question is whether or not the FTC will actually enforce the new rules and go after violators. Part of the rule change does give the FTC more leeway in going after those responsible for the messages, but until the FTC really does start shutting some of these operations down, you can bet they'll continue making the automated pre-recorded calls. I'm sure I'll be hearing about the imminent expiration of the factory warranty on my vehicle for some time.

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These days it's almost guaranteed: if you do something innovative in the tech world, bringing a new type of product to market successfully, get ready for that lawsuit. If anything, it's almost surprising that this lawsuit wasn't filed earlier, but research firm HillCrest Labs has sued Nintendo for patent infringement over its Wii controller. And, of course, HillCrest gets two cracks at it, since the company is using the popular loophole to both file a lawsuit in court and ask the International Trade Commission (ITC) for an injunction against Nintendo.

At this point, plenty of companies are recognizing that it's just too expensive to actually innovate. If you do something well, you're only going to get sued by someone else who hasn't been able to innovate as well as you. While we can point to the various examples of companies getting sued, it's also worth thinking about all the companies who don't even bother to innovate, recognizing it's just not worth the expense of these lawsuits. The patent system is functioning in exactly the opposite manner from its constitutional purpose. It's not promoting the progress, it's hindering it by making sure that "progress" has a toll booth attached to it.

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Ragnar Tornquist is respected as one of the best storytellers in today's game industry. He's done work on Anarchy: Online, Dreamfall, and upcoming MMO The Secret World. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a lengthy three-part interview with Tornquist about how good stories are crafted, how they interact with other aspects of the games, and what his preferences are for building a compelling character. "We had all these characters who were on a journey of faith, and we said how can we ensure that this theme is carried through, and have a clear view of how their journeys happen. So we said, every single major character had to fit into this model. Everybody starts out at the top. Faith can be anything — it can be religion, it can be a belief in yourself, in your abilities, in the work you do. As we face challenge, there's a process where we have loss of faith. It can be a minor thing: thinking one day, 'God, I suck at what I do. I can't do this.' And a lot of people after that point turn themselves around, face those problems, challenge them and they conquer them, and they say, 'Screw that, I am good at what I do.' I think most happy people live in this loop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m a big fan of swearing. Not in the derogatory, directed-at-you kind of way (“hey, fuck you!”), but as verbal marker to underline key concepts, create emphasis, and express passion. It certainly doesn’t work in every environment nor should it, but there are plenty were it does.

The first place where I’ve found it to be useful is between coworkers (“fuck, that’s awesome”). A team of British researchers found a while ago that profanity at work can help build solidarity and release stress. Couldn’t agree more. When people feel comfortable enough to let their emotions bare with the use of profanity, I’ve found the resulting atmosphere to be so much more relaxed and pleasurable. It’s not the profanity itself (although I adore “fuck” as one of the most versatile words in the English language), but what it says about the knitting of the culture.

The second place I’ve used profanity to great effect is at conferences where you feel you know the audience enough to loosen your tie and want to create a mental dog ear for an idea. Of all the presentations I’ve given, I’ve generally had the most positive feedback from the ones that carried enough passion to warrant profanity and it’s been very effective in making people remember key ideas (“they sell fucking shoes”).

It seems that profanity can work as a record button for the brain. It brings people to the edge of their attention as they’re trying to figure out whether they’re supposed to be offended or inspired. And then the content warrants the emphasis, the idea seems to stick better and longer and with more affection.

As with any tool, it can certainly be misused and applied to the wrong audience. But you can cut yourself with a great steak knife too. Use profanity with care and in the right context and it can be fucking amazing.

These newlyweds know how to party. They were tasered and arrested at their raucous wedding reception, and two days later they were tasered and arrested again.

(Photo by Kacper Skowron/For the Sun-Times)

"The short version of the story is they didn't want to quit their partying," said Mike Sepic, Berrien County, Mich., chief assistant prosecutor. "If you put this in the class of wedding receptions gone bad, I guess this would take the cake."

And the story didn't end after the reception. Two nights later, the bride and groom were again arrested in Michigan -- and again shocked by a stun gun -- after struggling with police investigating a noise complaint, Sepic said. The groom was charged with pushing his new wife down during that incident, but the charge was later dropped as part of a plea bargain, Sepic said.

Newlyweds are Tasered, arrested at reception melee, and again two days later (suntimes.com) (via For Your Entertainment)

least_weasel writes "An article on Ars Technica reveals Mozilla's intention to create and release a plugin for Internet Explorer that would allow the often-criticized IE to utilize some of the cooler rendering code developed for Firefox. The current WIP focuses on rendering using HTML5 standards, but the plans seem to be more ambitious than just fixing this one small piece of IE. The article covers some of the plans, hurdles, and potential benefits. It also spills the beans on the code name for the project: Screaming Monkey."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast agreed last year to change the way it was dealing with supposedly "heavy" users, after it came out (following many denials from Comcast) that the company was using a rather heavy-handed manner to block certain services from working, without bothering to tell anyone. Now the company has said that it will be implementing a plan whereby heavy bandwidth users will be sent to a sort of "time out" room where all of their traffic will be slowed down for a period of 10 to 20 minutes. Consider it the flipside to Comcast's Powerboost offering, which was supposedly designed for the exact opposite purpose: to help heavy downloaders get more bandwidth when they needed it. Now, apparently that gets you punished.

Meanwhile, over at the PFF conference, execs from Comcast (and Verizon) were apparently complaining that lobbyists were shaping the net neutrality debate, leaving out the part where it was their own lobbyists who really kicked that process off. Update: Oh, and as was widely expected, despite the FCC voting against Comcast, the company will not be fined or anything.

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DragonTHC writes "I'm thinking about hosting a lan party open to the public. I'm aiming for approximately 60 people to attend. I can handle all the logistics of operation. The only thing I can't wrap my head around is: how do I prevent theft at the lan party? Do I hire security guards? Do I need security cameras? I don't know the people who will attend, and I don't know if they're trustworthy enough to not steal other people's equipment. What do I do?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A quick update on previous BB posts (one, two, three) about American tech-artists and activists detained for pro-Tibet protests in Beijing. A Students for a Free Tibet spokesperson tells Boing Boing:

Everyone listed here is still missing.

- James Powderly
- Brian Conley
- Jeffrey Rae
- Jeff Goldin
- Michael Liss
- Tom Grant

They were all working in Beijing in different ways, as citizen journalists and activists. My opinion at this point is they are being held longer than other detained activists because they all had much more gear - macbooks, eee pc's, HD video cameras, digital SLR cams... standard stuff in most places, but I can imagine it raises a lot of eyebrows to the authorities in China, especially when related to protests and Tibet.

We are in active touch with the US Embassy in Bejing the the US State Department... the big deadline we are just hitting 48 hours right now, so 24 hours left until the 3 day mark.

The activists who deployed the LED banner have all already been sent home, arriving in JFK right about now.

And below, word of additional, new detentions of a Tibetan-German activist and two others from the United States. Snip from SFT announcement:

Beijing – After intense surveillance by up to 50 plainclothes police, a Tibetan-German man and two pro-Tibet activists protested tonight near the Bird’s Nest stadium. The three raised their fists in the air, unfurled a Tibetan flag, and called out “Free Tibet” at approximately 12:05 am Beijing time. A fourth Tibet activist who observed the protest was detained by police at the scene. The four were taken away in a police vehicle and their whereabouts are unknown.

The four are Tibetan-German Florien Norbu Gyanatshang, 30, American Jeremy Wells, 38, American John Watterberg, 30, and Briton Mandie McKeown, 41.

“Against all odds, a Tibetan has once again raised our outlawed national flag in Beijing tonight,” said Lhadon Tethong, the Tibetan-Canadian Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “This action symbolises the determination and steadfast commitment of the Tibetan people and our supporters from around the world to achieve freedom and justice for six million Tibetans living under the brutal rule of the Chinese government.”

Tibetans and Tibet supporters have defied the best efforts of the Chinese authorities to silence all voices of dissent during the Olympic Games, staging eight protests in Beijing over the past two weeks. The protests have ranged from technically-challenging banner hangs to a dramatic “die-in” at Tiananmen Square. Surveillance efforts by Chinese authorities increased dramatically over the past few days.

“The Chinese government is petrified of these peaceful acts of defiance simply because they represent the true feelings of Tibetans inside Tibet,” said Tenzin Dorjee, Deputy Director of Students for a Free Tibet. “Our protests are a reminder to the world of the tragic reality of the Chinese government’s illegitimate occupation of Tibet and the urgent need for the Chinese leadership to seek a resolution with the Tibetan people.”

Lhadon Tethong, director of Students for a Free Tibet, quoted in this New York Times article:

[Tethong] said she was more concerned with the plight of protesters in Tibet. In recent days, she said, at least three people have reportedly been killed in the city of Ganzi after protesting on the street. She said one woman, Dolma Yungzom, was shot five or six times point blank after she unfurled a banner, though Ms. Tethong provided no evidence.

Watch video updates on FT08tv.

Previously on Boing Boing blog:
* Beijing: "Alive in Baghdad" videoblogger among US citizens detained in pro-Tibet protests
* Beijing: Five US activists detained after lighting up "Free Tibet" LED Throwies banner near Olympics site
* GRL's James Powderly detained in Beijing for planning pro-Tibet "L.A.S.E.R. Stencil" art protest

Related episodes of Boing Boing tv:
* BBtv WORLD (Tibet): Inside Lhasa
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet report - monks forced to participate in staged videos.
* Vlog (Xeni): Tibet's uprising and the internet